Making a movie on credit cards and bombing your first screening doesn’t sound like the origin story of a film legend, but Kevin Smith, the mind behind Clerks, Jay and Silent Bob, and Dogma (recently released in 4K for the film’s 25th anniversary) did exactly that before shooting to stardom. 

Sometimes, success takes an unorthodox path, and reflecting back on his journey, Smith has an unconventional pearl of wisdom: Be a little delusional. Or, in his words, have a reasonable amount of unreasonability.

KEVIN SMITH: I stand before you on Big Think as the first to stand. Kids, all my energy is delivered this way. So I asked the good folks. I was like, "Can I stand?" "Yeah?" And here we are. So let's go on the journey together on our feet.

I feel, in order to get to where you're going, requires a reasonable amount of unreasonability. Not like, "Hey, man. I'm going to jump off a building and fly without the aid of a jetpack." That's unreasonable unreasonability. Reasonable amount is just like, "You know, why not me?"

Hey, kids. My name's Kevin Smith. Started in 1994 with a little motion picture named "Clerks," and that's how people came to know me was as a writer director. "Mallrats," "Chasing Amy," "Dogma," "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back," "Jersey Girl," "Cop Out," "Red State," "Tusk." The list goes on, kids. I've got sixteen movies. I'm heading toward my seventeenth. So mostly, my career, I've been a filmmaker, but somewhere along the line, I decided to just become myself, for a living, professionally. So my real title is professional Kevin Smith.

Everybody, mostly everybody, except people who are born rich, everybody has had a sh**ty job, and that's what "Clerks" is about, having a job you hate so much that you do anything else at the job to forget about the fact that you're there to work.

"This guy is going through all the eggs. Look. This has been going on for twenty minutes now."

At the end of the day, there's always going to be some job you don't want that you can take. I'd rather die trying to do something I love doing and hope it works out than just kind of commit to that right away. So I always had a piece of me that felt like the risk's worth taking. Why not try to make your dreams come true?

I dreamt about movies. I'd seen a motion picture called "Slacker" written and directed by Richard Linklater, and he was a filmmaker working in Austin, Texas. I did not realize that Austin, Texas, where "Slacker" was made, was the capital of Texas. All I heard was this kid made a movie in Texas, in Nowheresville, Texas, and it worked out? Well, maybe I can make a movie in Nowheresville, New Jersey. I said, "What's the story I could tell? I have access to this convenience store. I work in it all the time. I've never seen a movie made in a convenience store before. Maybe that could be my thing."

After I made the flick, right, I make "Clerks," and I make it on credit cards, twenty-seven thousand five hundred and seventy-five bucks, and I was steamrolling toward this one event, not Sundance. It is called the IFFM, the Independent Feature Film Marketplace. The idea of the marketplace is you fill it with as many potential buyers or press as possible to see the movie. It's not a film festival. It's a marketplace, about sales. We go, and the only people in the audience at the Angelika Film Center are me and the cast and crew. So ten of us, and we all worked on the movie.

And the first ten minutes of watching my movie on the big screen, this was the thought process. My god. Why did I do this? Why is everyone, look so terrible? This movie looks like it was shot through a glass of milk. Why won't they stop cursing? What was I thinking? I had a kind of breakdown, in the moment, in the theater. About fifteen minutes into the movie, I cognitively reframed it. And I was like, you know what? Two and a half years ago, you were sitting in this movie theater watching Richard Linklater's "Slacker," and you had no vision of being a filmmaker. And here you are two and a half years later, and you're watching your own movie in this theater. And, yeah, it didn't fill up the way you hoped, but you did it.

So this costs money that you don't have. So this is what you're going to do. You're going to go get another job. And if you have to, you're going to get a third job. You'll get another job, another job if you have to, so you pay off this credit card debt. And then when you pay off that debt, you're going to do this one more time before you leave this world because did you know who you were for the first time in your life when you were standing on that set? You knew exactly who you were supposed to be. Your whole life prior to that has been a mystery. And then bam, just like that, everything became crystal clear. Don't sell out on this just because it didn't work the way you wanted it to. Remember that feeling of finally knowing who you are, and get back to that feeling one day. It may cost time, and it may cost money, but get back to that. That was the most gratifying thing you've ever felt in this lifetime.

Mercifully, somebody said, "You should take this movie to Sundance." And we submitted it. It got picked up for Sundance, one of sixteen movies of four hundred that were submitted. Miramax bought it. Suddenly, I went from being a guy who worked in a convenience store and made a movie to having a career in film. I got to pay off that debt. I didn't have to worry about that. That was thirty-one years ago.

My parents, when I was heading toward film, they were like, "What's your backup?" You know, because parents care and they feel like the field that I was heading toward was one that success was never going to be guaranteed, and in the case of their idiot son, probably wasn't even going to happen. But having a reasonable amount of unreasonability allowed me to be like, well, I understand reasonably speaking that a lot of people don't bet on themselves and make a movie even though they've never made one before. But I got a reasonable amount of unreasonability here.

And so I pursued a career of extended adolescence because I'll be honest with you kids, one day you die screaming like my father did. You might as well go for it. You might as well do the thing that you dream about doing for heaven's sake.

Thanks, Kevin. This has been great. We'd love to take some portraits of you. Can we do some portrait standing? And then would you mind sitting for a couple portraits?

No. No. I don't want to sit, but I'll totally stand for as many portraits as you want. I'm getting my steps in. And while I was doing this, I hit ten thousand.